How I helped allUP increase user activation by simplifying their web and iOS app.
Product Design
Product Strategy
Design System
website development
Back home
Impact of my work
Efficiency
We accelerated design and engineering by creating and documenting reusable components in Figma.
Retention
We improved retention across the board through simplified onboarding, reducing friction, and net new features.
Funding
The improved product showed palpable progress which led to additional rounds funding.
Firstly, what is allUP?
allUP is a professional social network built upon video testimonials. Your profile is built using self recorded videos and videos from other people.
It's designed to help individuals stand out in the job market beyond traditional resumes, enabling them to be discovered by hiring managers and recruiters worldwide.
Industry
Consumer, Social, Hiring
total Team size
10 ~ 15 people
My role
Product Designer
Research
Design
Prototyping
Problem solving
Platforms
iOS app
Web app
Webflow Website
The situation
allUP was growing, fast.
When I joined the team in 2023, they were receiving a massive influx of users. Exponential growth is amazing, but also worrisome as the the product's design had not been meaningful improved in over year.
If left unaddressed, it could lead many users churning fast, which would stunt long term growth.
solutions
My role as a product designer
I was brought on to improve the design and functionality. I was responsible for finding solutions to the ambiguous problems and advocating for users within each project. Being a scrappy startup, I wore many hats during my time at allUP.
This meant:
Redesigning key pages and flows in our mobile & desktop app
Working 1 on 1 with our co-founders to bring their vision to live
Collaborating on PRD’s in Notion to clarify ambiguous problems
Building, managing, & maintaining a design system in Figma
Designing & developing landing pages on our Webflow Website
Success metrics and KPIs
Defining what success looks like
We had a few kew metrics we chose to track to ensure projects resulted in success. These were chosen based on short term and long term goals for both users and for allUP's business.
key metrics included:
Increasing user activation. More profiles completed, more videos recorded, and more people engaging with our product.
Reducing churn rate. Increasing retention, locating pain points, reducing friction, creating features users desire.
Increasing onboarding conversions. Reducing friction, simplifying complex flows, and people informed and aware.
Here are a few key projects that helped us achieve these success metrics
Instant feedback concept and prototype
Giving people confidence with the assistance of Ai
A primary goal at allUP was to build confidence in people. A bet we made to build trust was to utilize our unique AI system to give instant feedback to people's videos.
I led the design from concept, ideation, prototype, to launch. I explored a number options, one I am most excited about was having a chat like feel that would invite people to ask more.
After discussions on tradeoffs and priorities, we ended up shipping a simplified version of this design.
This projected resulted in increased user engagement and showcased the capabilities of the allUP AI.
Before
After
iOS profile design
Simplifying a complex profile
A user should feel proud of his profile. The current profile's had room for improvement, both visually and functionally. This was supported by the tons of support tickets and confusion we received from users.
I led the redesign of the profile from start to finish. My goal was to improve the visual hierarchy, organize sections based on importance, and make the content much easier to skim and understand.
The impacts were undeniable from an objective design point. This led to an increase in profile being filled out and a reduction in support tickets.
Profile completeness — Different stages and screens
Making progress easy
During talks with users, they'd often say that once they signed up and were in our app, they didn't know what to do. They'd poke around a few screens, not find anything to do, then leave.
This lead to lots of uncompleted profiles and a low user activation.
After discussions with the team, a hypothesis we came up with was to provide people a clear and concise path to complete their profiles. This become colloquially known as "Profile Completeness"
I designed the flow from start to finish. Some key parts included:
A progress bar to give people reassurance they were progressing
Keeping the number of tasks minimal to not overwhelm users
Using "Traffic colors" to bring attention to the state of their profile
Hiring manager landing page in Webflow
Developing landing pages in Webflow
Having 10+ years experience using Webflow, I was able to create, design, and manage our website. I helped setup our CMS and blog, built and animated landing pages, and optimized our site to load fast.
Candidate review page, desktop
Helping people hire & find the perfect fit
In 2024, the team saw an opportunity in the market to assist with hiring.
Our tools were perfect for helping both candidates and teams find the perfect fit. I helped the team bridge this gap into a new offering.
For our iOS and web app, I helped design onboarding flows, job application pages, reviewing candidate pages, and more.
My guiding principle for designing this were transparency and clarity, since allUP was still in it's early stages and people didn't know us yet.
This work had a huge impact. We saw 50% growth month over month with meaningful increases to conversion rates and user activation.
Creating a Design System for Desktop and Mobile
Me and Jeff Ham, another designer on our team, collaborated to create a clean and cohesive design system in Figma.
This included Tokens, variables, all the goodies you want and expect.
Loom videos, Figma documentation, Detailed slack messages
Making engineering's life as easy as possible
A huge role of Product Designer is to work well with Engineering. During my career, I've aimed to make Engineers life's as easy as possible.
Here's a few key things I did to employ this principle at allUP:
Creating clear and clean documentation in Figma
Providing context and rationale for projects in Loom videos
Jumping into code (React, Swift) to parse and understand structures
Considering edge cases and constraints before proposing solutions
All this resulted in (what I hope) was a great working relationship. I was fortunate that dev team was easy to work with, as such we were able to ship lots of projects to production.
Here's what our CTO, Dave, had to say about my work:
Dakota is very proactive and always asks questions to our devs about the product and design. He's knows our product well, which leads to his solutions being in scope and solving right thing for our ends users. Every project he's touched has resulted in a massive improvement.
Dave Grijalva
CTO, Cofounder @ allUP
or watch Dave endorse me
Closing thoughts
My time at allUP was amazing.
It was both exhilarating and exhausting, in the best of ways.
As my first design role at a pre-seed startup, and I grew exponentially.
Working with a small and scrappy team broke a lot of beliefs of what we could accomplish, and pushed me ahead to build more than I thought was possible.
A guiding principle throughout my work at allUP was a quote (admittedly a bit cliche ¯\_(ツ)_/¯) from the legend Dieter Rams:
Less, but better
Dieter Rams
Hearing this quote is one thing.
Utilizing it and seeing the results, immensely rewarding.
I’m thankful to have done that at allUP.
Special thanks
While this case study highlighted my role, none of this work would have happened without the talented product and ENG team. A huge thanks and shoutout to everyone I worked with!
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